Proper citations in the text

Citing in a proper way

In the previous section we discussed how to cite a resource in your text. When you need to refer to the literature in a text it is important to give a reference to a suitable and well chosen resource. It is also important to make clear to the reader why you are refering to a certain resource. It is not enough to just give a citation at the end of a sentence, it must be clear to the reader why this specific resource is given and where to look in it if needed. As said before, there should be no “gratuitious” references in your report/article/book. After you are finished with writing have a final look at all the citations, make sure that someone who reads your text has a clear answer to the following two questions

Below we give some good/poor examples illustrating these two points.

Naturally, the set of isotopic knots form an equivalence class on the set of all knots and classification follows [1].

This citation is rather ambiguous. The reader has only a vague impression of what is discussed in [1]. What is missing is a concrete reference to a result, section or chapter for [1]. The following citation is a good example.

All other logical symbols can be seen as abbreviations. To demonstrate these semantics we look at an example from [1, page 1, figure 1.1] (Figure 2.1 in this document).

A second example where it is ambiguous why a specific citation is given, is the following

An application where neural networks are widely used is pattern recognition with hand writing recognition being a typical example [1, 2].

What is the problem with these two references? First of all, the second reference seems very general given the context in which it is given. It is given as a reference to “writing recognition”, while it concerns a much broader topic. The reader may wonder, Is there a chapter in it concerning hand writing recognition? Or does the autor give a complete overview of the literature on this topic? Hence this citation should be made more concrete. The first reference seems more relevant but still, it is not clear why it is given. A suggestion to improve the text could be the following

An application where neural networks are widely used is pattern recognition, with hand writing recognition being a typical example. For a clear exhibition on how neural networks can be applied in this context we refer to [1]. We refer the interested reader to [2] for an overview of some modern techniques for deep learning and their application in pattern recognition.